Linguistics Research on English as a Lingua Franca (Chair of Univ.-Prof. Dr. Barbara Seidlhofer).

The Centre began a new project with audiovisual resources for Mag. Veronika Thir, University assistant at the Department of English and American Studies. Mag. Thir was managing this project of her own design, with experiments with speakers of English as a lingua franca. The original linguistic data she collected focus on Interaction and Stimulated Recall. The Centre was implementing Veronika Thir's conception for audiovisuals with recordings on professional systems (for film production e.g. of the most significant experiments).

ORF CD-Production “Flute Extended”

In 2015, the AVZ completed a new 80 minute set of productions with international academic composers (from France, Austria, Canada - and Great Britain). The focal point of the CD was on Sylvie Lacroix, composer and flautist from Lyon, France. A distinguished guest was Assoc. Prof. Daniel P. Biro of the University of Victoria, Canada, at the time of the recording Guest Professor at the University of Harvard. Lacroix is the subject of research into women composers by Dr. Gerlinde Haas, of our Faculty, and Lacroix and the production’s composer Tanja Brüggemann have already been presented in an LV at the Institut für Musikwissenschaft. The AVZ was especially pleased when the Austrian Radio (ORF) choose the production to be a new CD on the Austrian Radio’s own label (CD 3194). This indicates that the AVKPF was working to the standards that are expected within the ORF itself, one of the leading classical music radio stations in Europe.
Austrian Radio continued to advertise the CD on the ORF’s channel Ö1, playing excerpts from the seven compositions represented.

Composition and Production for The exil.arte Project

Univ.-Prof. DDr.h.c. Gerold W. Gruber of the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna founded the project exil.arte in 2006, the Austrian Contact Point for Exiled Music. For many years exil.arte enjoyed the patronage of President of the Austrian Parliament Barbara Prammer (1954-2015). Almost 450 participants and institutions have contributed to exil.arte to date. Details of the project are presented on its web site at www.exilarte.at. The composers in question were those in the Twentieth Century who were persecuted and forced into exile by the Nazi regime.
It is a widely acknowledged fact that in the 1930’s Austria’s exiled composers, particularly Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Max Steiner, laid the foundations for orchestral film music as global audiences have come to understand it. But composers such as Steiner and especially Korngold were not only film composers but masters in their own right. The definitive Korngold biography by Brendan Caroll has been brought out in a German edition by Professor Gruber.
In part to mark the tenth anniversary of the project, exil.arte commissioned a new web site, which also contains interviews with composers, musicologists on the subject of film music. AVZ contributed music to the website interviews, which consists of newly composed and produced emulations of early silent movie themes, Schönberg the orchestral composer, as well as orchestral excerpts in the styles of Max Steiner and Korngold. filmmusik.exilarte.at

Pilot Project: Univ.-Prof Dr. Elissa Pustka and the International Learners of Spanish Project.

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Elissa Pustka, chair of linguistics at the Department of Romance Studies and her team conducted an extended pilot project at the AVZ with interactions between Native Speakers of Spanish from Spain, and South and Central America, interacting with Spanish learners of various levels of expertise. She has published widely on this area of scholarship, most recently in her forthcoming volume Pustka, Elissa: Einführung in die Phonetik und Phonologie des Spanischen, Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag. Professor Pustka, who has experience in the medium of audio recording, decided on a classical, low-reverberation recording with a large diaphragm condenser radio microphone, to produce not only the desired vocal proximity effect but primarily to enhance the analyzable quality of the captured speech, which she is examining at detailed levels of phonetic structure. The audio resources were captured in Avid Pro Tools HD at high resolution for further algorithmic treatment for noise reduction and optimization of levels, so that these audio files can easily be compressed, for e.g. telematic purposes, while retaining maximum intelligibility.

Projekt: Das Liedgut von Nina Simone

In the Spiegel Online article Kunst, Kampf und Krankheit from 25. 7. 2015, Tobi Müller has written of the Wiederentdeckung von Nina Simone (the rediscovery of Nina Simone). Arguably the life and art of N. Simone (1933 - 2003) is of relevance to many departments at a Faculty of Philology and Cultural Studies. She was an Afro-American singer, composer and pianist who worked outside the production centres of Detroit and Chicago, and played a role in the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Movement in the USA. Nina Simone can be said to have relevance for Gender Studies, Amerikanistik, Contemporary History, Musicology and with her sojourns in Africa, for the Afrikanistik department.
The connection to Vienna is that Nina Simone was first and foremost a classical musician. She studied at the Juilliard School of Music, nearly gaining access to the Curtis Institute to study as a concert pianist. The inspiration for her music came from the Viennese Classics and Bach. That is why she called her music not Jazz, but “Black Classical Music”.
In a music production and interview project, the AVZ managed to engage one of the last active musicians who worked with Nina Simone, performed with her and were part of her inner circle, namely Hannibal Means, Afro-American baritone from Oakland, California. Means was a young flautist, percussionist and above all, virtuoso Gospel singer when he became a protegé of Nina Simone. Like Simone, Means combines classical music with Afro-American music, which explains his move to Vienna to perform and to teach voice.
The wissenschaftliche Zusammenarbeit (research cooperation) here was with Prä-Doc Mag. William James Schmidt MA, of Melbourne Australia, a concert pianist and musicologist. Schmidt is a Masters graduate of the Lehrkanzel of Vizerektor Univ-Prof. Dr. Johannes Kropfitsch of the Musik und Kunst Privatuniversität der Stadt Wien (formerly Privatuniversität Conservatorium der Stadt Wien). Contributors to the project were Lena Fankenhauser, viola, graduate of the Juilliard School of Music, L. Dickson, solo percussionist of Austria’s Burgtheater and H. Jäger, solo bassist of the Vereinigten Bühnen Vienna.
The project can provide working files (Arbeitsdateien) and finished material from this new collection of fourteen of Nina Simons’s compositions and covers, as well as its Interview project with Hannibal Means on Nina Simone and her life and times, to the Faculty scholars, masters thesis and PhD thesis candidates.

Lehrkanzel Vizerektorin Univ.-Prof. Dr. Eva Vetter, Analysis of Enquiry Based Learning.

The challenge for scholars who are analyzing Enquiry Based Learning is that this promising form of pedagogy has to be captured in its real classroom context, where the Enquiry Based Learning groups are all active concurrently in one room. It is very difficult for the researchers to capture vocal interaction with the high level of background noise from the attendant EBL groups and the teacher in the typical classroom environment, whether in a school or a university. Vizerektorin Univ-Prof. Vetter and her team turned to the Faculty AV Experts Dr. Otto Mörth, video, and Dr. Stephen Ferguson, for a solution, which involved multiple cameras, FCP X Editing by Dr. Mörth, and a multitrack live audio solution from Dr. Ferguson.
Four films were produced in Lower Austria in a Secondary School, with the permission of teaching staff, pupils and parents, and formed the backbone of further endeavours in this field by Prof. Vetter and her researchers.

Meaghan Burke, Werke für Cello und Stimme

Meaghan Burke is a graduate of the University of Yale. She is active as a cellist, vocalist, composer and lyricist in both New York and Vienna, commuting regularly between the two cities. Burke is one of the leading lights of the New York scene and has been a former sidewoman of John Zorn. Her work is a blend of improvisational abilities and classical sensibilities which she has trained in her studies in Vienna University of Music and Performing Arts.
Ms. Burke contributed to many productions at the AVZ including our production of the Six Studies for Violoncello Solo 2009 of Nancy van der Vate, only the second woman composer to receive a Ph.D in composition in the United States. M. Burke is also represented in the AVZ collection of poems by Anthony Joseph, Ph. D, a production in connection with Dr. Julia Lajta-Novak of Salzburg University. The Trinidadian poet Anthony Joseph’s Bird Head Son is a poetic collection with themes of migration and diaspora. In this recent production, Meaghan Burke’s compositions were recorded and prepared for further production treatment in New York, ultimately returning to Vienna, where they were mixed in the St. Marx Room 36 studio.